[specialist]

Those ReST examples reminds me of the ASCII docs I'd write for my shareware software. Fairly typical for the time.

Not so different from the IEFT Document Conventions. http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3.txt

Or the RFC guidelines. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-style-guide/rfc-style

I wrote a markdown renderer for my web dev stack. And I've been "cross compiling" to markdown, screen scrapping docs and persisting it to markdown.

Now I realize choosing markdown was rather arbitrary (personal preference, familiarity). Any document structure would suffice.

Nice comparison, thanks.